“The Wire” Calls It A Wrap

Maybe only those of us who have been in the newspaper business long enough to recall the days before blogging and the Internet will actually get the title that creator David Simon appliedÂ to tonight’sÂ mesmerizing series finaleÂ of “The Wire.”

“30”

It’s a reference to what we used toÂ put at the bottom of our typewriter-produced stories. Don’t ask me where the term came from, or why we just didn’t write “The End.” That’sÂ simply the way we did things way, way back then.

For some of us, that “30” takes on extra meaning this week. Not onlyÂ are we being forced to part withÂ a towering television achievement — created by a man with newspaper ink in his veins. But a great many friends and colleagues are seeing their newspaperingÂ days coming to an end asÂ a struggling industry copes with downsizing via buyouts and layoffs. It’s sad and it’s depressing and it has a lot of us taking stock of our lives and careers.

Simon has devoted much of this controversial final season to examiningÂ howÂ a shrinking mediaÂ manages to cover (or not cover) news in its backyard. Like many real-life reporters, his fictional Baltimore Sun reporters are working under aÂ “Do More With Less” mantraÂ that is echoing throughout newsrooms across America. One of Simon’s characters — a metro reporter named Templeton — has even been “cooking” his stories with phony quotes and elements about aÂ serial killer –Â who also happens to be phony.Â

Â “What’s amusing to me is that a lot of people got caught up in the newsroom fabricator,” Simon says. “But the important subtext of the story is what the newspaper is choosing to cover and what it’s failing to cover. And all of that is rooted in sad reality. … Throughout the season, the viewers knew what was really going on in the streets — things that the newspaper didn’t know.”

Simon has long said that he never planned to go into television. A former cops reporter, heÂ had always thought he’d be perfectly happy to grow old on the copy desk, swapping stories with his croniesÂ about theÂ legendary H.L. Mencken. He admits that “we obviously stirred some (stuff) up” in this season’sÂ media storyline, but continues to insisist that, overall, it wasn’t a “particularly vicious” critique.Â

“We said everything we wanted to say (about the media) and we didn’t say it without some sympathy,” he says. “There is some heroic journalism thatÂ happens even amid the cutbacks that are brutalizing the newsrooms everywhere. I still have friends at The Sun and I’m still a lover of newspapering. … I still truly believe in the idea of newspapers.”